Conservation and Development: A Review of Research and Approaches

This essay provides a background to the research on conservation and development, highlighting the evolution from exclusionary approaches to community-based and integrated models. It discusses the challenges in aligning conservation and development goals, including issues of participation, empowerment, and sustainability. The essay explores various approaches, such as partnerships, cross-scale institutional linkages, and the importance of local resource users. It references case studies like marine protected areas, extractive reserves, and small-scale fisheries management. The essay emphasizes the need for fundamental changes in management strategies and decision-making to effectively meet conservation and development goals. It also looks at the roles of corporations and governments, and the importance of considering the needs of the poor in development efforts. The essay concludes by emphasizing the significance of partnerships and cross-scale institutional linkages for improved outcomes.

1. 1 Background to the Research
Conservation and development have been organized and conducted in different forms. Often, the
goals of conservation were thought to be conflicting with the goals of development. Traditional,
exclusionary approaches to protected areas using “fortress conservation” or “fences and fines”
approaches have not met the conservation objectives effectively (Brown, 2002). These
approaches distance local resource users, perceiving as drain on the scarce resources of many
countries, impoverishing and marginalizing rural communities in poverty (Brown, 2002). The
experiences of community-based conservation programs in the 1980s and 1990s have convinced
researchers and donor agencies that programs must be based on the active support of local
resource users providing appropriate incentives, and institutional support (Mahanty, 2002). The
attempts to integrate development with conservation in the community-based approach, putting
people at the forefront, has achieved some success through the integrated conservation and
development projects of the 1980s, community-based conservation of the 1990s and emerging
trends in resource management, wildlife use and extraction more recently. Some critics have
pointed out that even these people-oriented approaches to conservation have largely failed to
achieve their main goal: the protection of biological diversity (Wilshusen et al., 2002).
Hence, the general trend had been that the results of community-based conservation had been
mixed. There are not enough community level successful cases that provide evidence to
substantiate the claim that conservation and development efforts could be met simultaneously.
Many researchers have cited different reasons for the failure of integrating conservation and
development goals and one of them is the impracticality of the approaches used. Others have
suggested that conservation and development integration have failed since there are
misconceptions about community, participation, empowerment and sustainability (Brown, 2002).
Participation and partnerships among different levels of government and community is emerging
as a new approach ensuring sustainable management of biodiversity resources and promoting
community development and reducing poverty.
Even for corporations (Waddock, 1988) and governments (Wildridge et al., 2004), especially
with the modernization agenda and with the forces of globalization, it is no longer effective for
organizations to work alone. Within the public, private and voluntary sectors, the need for
partnerships working, often cross-sectoral working or working beyond the boundaries is
recognized as a vital component of success (Wildridge et al., 2004). Recognizing partnerships as
significant vehicle for implementing rural development policy in Britain scalar hierarchy of the
state has been influential in structuring the scales and territories of partnerships, and that, despite
an apparent devolution of the public face of governance, the state remains crucial in governing
the process of governance through partnerships (Edwards et al., 2001). Brown (2002) using two
case studies of innovative initiatives in integrated conservation and development (ICD), a marine
protected area in the Caribbean, and extractive reserves in Brazilian Amazonia, concludes that
fundamental changes are necessary to institutions and management and decision-making
strategies to address these issues and to effectively meet the goals of conservation and
development. There are other cases, such as Small-scale fisheries management (Berkes, 2006),
India Eco-development Project, Karnataka, which examined the role of relationships and
networks between actors in conservation and development intervention (Mahanty, 2002).

Viewed from Amartya Sen’s development-as-freedom perspective of poverty, development
requires efforts in capability improvement and greater earning power (Sen, 1999). Similarly,
Chambers (1995: 173) believes that realities of the poor are local, diverse, often complex and
dynamic, and notes the neglected dimensions of deprivation. Chambers (1995: 173) mentions
that development should be reversals to enable poor people to analyze and articulate their own
needs. This notion resembles Sen’s capability framework. Although facing similar challenges,
the Equator Initiative cases have developed some innovative partnerships for conservation and
poverty reduction. Trends in development and conservation call for partnerships and cross-scale
institutional linkages for better outcomes.
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